11 Comments

General CommentI feel this song shows the connection between all things. From nature, woods, mountains, to a lover, to a growing baby in a womb, to swimmin'.

I also feel Mama Wolf is a name for the energy, the glow of life, not only human life, but plants, earth, animals. He knows what to call it now. That unnamed, I'll say glow again with lack of a better noun.

General CommentTo me, "mama wolf" seems like a metaphor for capital "N" nature, its wildness, and its beauty.

Nature is both a kind of "mother" in that we all come from and depend on nature, and it is a "wolf" because it is untamed, wild, and dangerous still. I think this characterization is actually very evocative and interesting.

The singer kind of recognizes "mama wolf" during birth, when in teh womb, when in the mountains, or the woods. He ends it with "when you're under me", which almost seems like a kind of lament; mama wolf is dead, or perhaps our wildness has been exorcised, and has been erased from our nature, though we are still reminded of it.

General Commenti thought it was just called "mama wolf" maybe not though, i got it off of soulseek so haha no idea. Just for a little fun, i read in an interview that in the end when the wolf is howling, they didn't even mean for it to happen at the moment. They had been trying to get the wolf to howl throughout the whole song, but it didn't howl until the violin hit the highest note, which worked out perfect for the song because it sounds really good.

I always got a sexual meaning from this line. Something like making love to nature. I don't know. The back half of Cripple Crow is weird. It's front loaded with a bunch of cute songs that might be a bit goofy and hippy at times, but Dragonflies hits and then the music starts existing in its own song-space and turns into some sort of Sgt. Pepper's-esque meltdown.

General CommentI also get a sexual meaning from "When you're under me", especially how quietly he almost mumbles it.. plus the last couple lines from before that start to make me think he's talking to a lover. So I would say he loves nature in different ways, and not solely as "mother nature".

General CommentHuh, interesting; I'd never thought about it being metaphorical like that. To me, Mama Wolf is a lover, a woman, who holds for the singer a mystical, spiritual quality akin to his feelings towards nature, and in particular he recognises her as part of nature. Feels kinda like he's giving her this name - a bit like a Native American name - to encapsulate the particular energy she radiates and the quality of her soul. She is, perhaps, a maternal person by nature, but with a deep wildness/fierceness too. DB seems to often talk about lovers with reference to them as mothers as well, nurturing etc, and to take pleasure in women's reproductive capacity as a wondrous thing, quite spiritual in its naturalness - not just an unfortunate side-effect of sexy times! It's unusual and, to me, as a woman, very sexy :) And he sees her most for who she truly is when they are in wild, natural places.